


Go.

by failsafe



Category: Pokemon GO
Genre: Augmented reality game, Creepypasta, Gen, Injury, Open to Interpretation, Urban Legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2016-09-30
Packaged: 2018-08-18 15:31:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8166914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: It's just a game... isn't it?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kisuru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kisuru/gifts).



> Going to be honest. I have literally only played the tutorial, but I am generally familiar with what is going on in the game and asked a friend what a desirable Pokemon one might go a bit out of one's way to catch might be. Overall, this is about the atmosphere I have observed in my downtown area when I have seen others playing it and an attempt to write something appropriately creepy for you. We actually matched on _Madoka_ prompts, and I liked all your prompts I was familiar with, but I was taken with this opportunity. I really hope you enjoy it and that it isn't majorly flawed in some mechanical way. 
> 
> The reader can choose which team the female trainer is for and any characteristics she might have. Only a few are prescribed.

It was just a phone app. It was revolutionary. It was just a game. It was a childhood dream come to life. It was nostalgia embodied, driving a full-grown generation of sedentary, millennial couch potatoes out onto the streets. They moved like the walking dead. They set up little communities in alcoves and on street corners. They were more strangely alive, in the dusky hours after sundown, than they had ever been. And it was just a phone app.

It would be fine, everyone insisted. It was going to bring about a collapse of morality and societal infrastructure as petty crimes of trespassing increased at an unprecedented rate, others said, others whispered, others laughed. Like one and like many big summer fads, it was news for a while, blessed and cursed to be forgotten as more pressing matters like elections, mergers, football, and the world economy shifted into a news cycle better-suited to a season of golden, blinding sunsets and Pumpkin Spice lines at Starbucks.

It was just a phone app... to most people.

* * *

It was the first cool day as fall faded into summer when she first noticed something strange. The sun had warmed the ground throughout the day but with a less oppressive weight than it had through the long string of hot days which had given rise to the little conclave which gathered each night downtown. By the time she was returning home, goose-pimples pricked along her bare arms, and the faint sheen of sweat against her shins dried away beneath the terse breath of a cool wind.

The warmth from the blond, light sidewalk in the residential neighborhood radiated upward like the faint touch of life against the strange, forgotten cool air which spoke of the other half of the year, closer to its return than anyone had remembered for months. For just a moment, she thought about crouching down, soaking in that lingering heat as if she might need it to keep alive. The primal feeling passed with the very next step and a faint, itching sting which punctuated her turn onto the path that led up to her front door.

It was made of wood, painted white, with rectangular windows slanting a diagonal down toward the doorknob, stopping at some point just below the reach of her eyes. Through a somewhat mottled glass, she saw a small, high-pitched, excitable dog running to meet her at the door. Its alarmed barking sounded off equal parts accusation, joy, and terror. She unlocked the door, taking in one final breath of the outside air. One thing about playing this game was that she didn't have to feel guilty about how little exercise she was getting. She felt better than she had in a long time. She felt more tired than she had in a long time. She really wanted a shower and thought so as she dropped her small backpack, kicked off her shoes, and felt the small, lapping tongue of the dog seeking out the salty remnant of sweat on her lower legs.

It bit at her. Not the little dog, but the itching, burning little pain that she had almost forgotten, somewhere just beyond the boundary of her front yard. She looked down at her tense, tired calf, and did a double-take. What she had thought might be a mosquito bite appeared much more serious, though she did not find it in herself to panic. Not yet. In her leg, there were two symmetrically placed but jagged little tears. At their edges, there was the faintest weeping of already-drying blood. Something had bitten her, it seemed, but it was no insect. It wasn't a snake, either, which might have been a relief, but it was nothing at all she recognized.

“Mom?” she called, somewhere in the house, and waited for a reply.

* * *

That was the first of the strange occurrences that would soon overtake more and more of her life like a stain leeching into once-pure cloth. She managed to convince herself, at first, that she was imagining things. Instead, she thought that she must have climbed over a fence the wrong way – it hadn't actually _said_ private property, and she hadn't been hurting anything. She'd slipped off the land as quickly as she had caught her prize, and she had walked home like nothing had happened. She hadn't even left shoe-prints behind on the damp grass.

* * *

The first time it occurred to her that maybe she would like to _just go home..._

The first time it occurred to her that maybe she should go back to the sofa and take up a hobby that didn't require looking at a screen so much – like knitting?

The first time it occurred to her that maybe she should have told someone, one of her friends, before she had taken off down a short alleyway in search of a Dragonite...

… was when she did not see the Pokemon she had expected on the screen.

She frowned at it. She looked at the dark, constantly readjusting image on the screen of the short road ahead of her. A damp, rainbow puddle formed beneath the end of a gutter. A closed dumpster jutted out into the path. The app told her one thing – her eyes told her something else.

She looked past her phone and saw, just behind the dumpster, the glinting, brilliant sheen of something orange. The scales glinted like jewels, and she could not believe her eyes.

She _couldn't_ believe them.

“Hey!” someone called from behind her. She looked around, following the sound of a half-familiar voice. Her feet followed her ears and she was running back into the clearer light of streetlamps and store signs. Maybe the next time...

* * *

The next time she wasn't _quite_ so lucky.

The next time she wasn't sure she was...

Where she was...

Ever going home...

What?

She looked up at the sky.

She could see the stars and the silvery light of the moon edging over the top of one building. Above her, the world was filtered between two buildings, two rows, and they seemed parallel and familiar...

Faintly familiar.

She reached up and rubbed at her forehead, her temples, massaging in slow circles.

“What?” she asked aloud.

When she moved her arms and tried to sit up, she gasped softly as something straight down her side, from her ribs to her hip, sharply started to sting.

She looked down and her eyes widened.

Her light shirt – white, but it was hard to tell – was stained down her right side, bright, bright red, and blooming outward to make some of the fibers pink.

“What?” she repeated softly, breathing deeply then more shallowly. She couldn't decide which made it worse. “What do I do?” she asked herself.

No one was there to answer her.

She reached down along the dampened side of her body, terrified of touching the source of the blood. She still felt she had no choice but to fish down into her pocket.

She pulled out her phone and held it above her face. For a moment, the familiarity of the motion quelled her panic, but the panic was only replaced by confusion.

The screen was black. She tried turning it on, and it hesitated.

She tried again.

When it came back on, there was a simple sphere – half red, half white – that spun and spun on a horizontal axis. It was one of the most familiar things she had ever seen but it took on an almost sinister quality, casting bright and reddened light over her face, her body.

Then, calming, gentle blue letters appeared on the screen. They were silent but seemed almost soothing.

_Look down._

The instruction was simple and clear, and she knew she was alone here, with no one else to guide her.

She looked down.

Breath by breath, she stayed steady, counting them. She saw her bloodied shirt but remembered that if it was bad enough to kill her, she probably would have been dead already.

 _Look down_ , it had said. What did it mean?

Slowly, she sat up. Just a little more blood stained her shirt, but not so much, and only in a few spots.

There alone, in the dim alley, she pulled her shirt up on her right side until it met her bra.

The words she found there were far less soothing than those on her phone's screen.

They appeared jagged and were obviously bloody, written into her flesh with some undetermined tool that seemed to natural and irregular to be anything like a scalpel or knife.

 _Train_ , one word said with a period that followed. _Live long enough to heal_ , another eerie, damning, hopeful statement suggested.

She looked around. She glanced at her phone. **100% battery**. That didn't make sense, but she knew she had to get up.

She knew she had to find her way home.

 


End file.
